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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29404209">The Last Evening</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Awenna/pseuds/Awenna'>Awenna</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Friendship, Gen, IN SPACE!, Road Trips</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 10:15:17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,250</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29404209</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Awenna/pseuds/Awenna</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A group of friends spent a year travelling in space and spending time together and tonight is their last evening. Time to think back on their year and to enjoy the time they have together.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Last Evening</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/sugarlipx/gifts">sugarlipx</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This story was written for a gift exchange on Jess' discord (you should check their art on twitter and tumblr @emryspaperart because it's dope) for Phi (check their great stuff @_sugarlipx_) who said they liked space and happy fluffy things (and other things, but my brain zoomed in those two things and gave me the idea of a group of friends travelling in space and in a cuddle pile and then this little story was born). It is a short story, a lil' snippet in a story that I might never write or might because now those characters are in my head.</p>
<p>I hope you like it Phi, it got a bit bittersweet sometimes because I do not know how not to do that.</p>
<p>The little avatars from the title image are from Djarn's picrew.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p>
<p>The last evening. This was the last evening on the ship. They would all see each other again after, of course, and the group chat would not disappear. They had all promised each other that they would continue to talk and go on holidays together. To Jupiter perhaps or the new commune that had opened on Europa, which promised to be a really cool and exciting place (and it would remind them of that one time on Titan. What a week that had been!). But that was for later. Right now, their year together was coming to an end.</p>
<p>It had been a good year, a really good year even. It had been a wonderful adventure. A bunch of 20-somethings, just out of university for some, already working for others, all deciding to take a year off to go and travel in space together, to meet new people and visit new planets.</p>
<p>It had been their childhood dreams, to all of them, Lila remembers. They had promised to each other when they had been only kids and did not really know about the practicalities. It was a dream and a promise. They had said they would buy a ship together and go explore the immensity of space (although she was pretty sure, they had not used the word “immensity” when she and her dear Léandre were eight.) Their group had always been together, all living around the same park at the back of their buildings as their meeting point and the place where they had made this promise. The twins, Assa and Hani had been nine and Camille seven. The twins were always up to no good, Camille was always going along, she was always keeping watch, and Léandre, always the serious one, was telling them that they should be more careful, that it was against the rules, that they were going to get caught, but she was always tagging along regardless.</p>
<p>Time had flown, they had gone their own ways, never losing track of the others even with the distance after they all left and no longer lived around the park. Camille had done an apprenticeship and had been working hard on learning everything there was to know about spaceships’ mechanics. “After all,” they had argued, “someone had to be able to repair <em>Astres</em>!” <em>Astres</em>, a French word for stars, was their ship, the one they would take for their future trip to space. And they had been right, the ship had needed plenty of repairs during that year. One time they had had to stop on a planet with acidic rain thinking that it would be fine. It had been until the rain had become so acidic that they had had to stay inside the ship because it was not safe outside for humans anymore. Oh, and the acidity of the rain had taken off their paint and even made a hole in the outer part of the ship (making worse an already small impact admittedly, but this was a SPACEship, a ship made for space, you would think it would survive acidic rain!). They had had to stay for two weeks for the repairs to be done (thankfully without further rain). And that planet? It was called Acidic! The name was a bit on the nose, but Lila guessed that they should probably have taken that name a little bit closer to heart.</p>
<p>Afterwards, they had taken that time to reminisce (a bit), play board games (a medium amount), and cuddle (a lot). They had also had time to rest. Camille was not on their own repairing as they all took turns playing the assistant. They took their time. They had plenty of it. This year was about them. They had learned in the first couple of months of their travels that space travel meant a lot (A Lot) of unexpected events and challenges, which in turn meant both that their plans should not be too strict in terms of dates and that they needed to take all the rest they could when they had the time. That is, in case they once again got pulled into a very unexpected, very exciting, and extremely tiring scheme.</p>
<p>That had happened a couple of months before on their fourth month on the road, well, among the stars. There were some flight paths in the busiest sections of the galaxy, but space was large enough that if you were careful, you could make your way undisturbed, only seeing another ship now and then.</p>
<p>Plus, Assa and Hani, the two pilots and co-pilots, both had flying in their blood. Their mums had been the youngest pilots ever admitted at the Academy, both at the same time. Oh, the rivalry! Lila loved to hear the story every time she was invited to their place for dinner. The twins had dreamt of getting their pilots licences and as soon as they had been of age, passed the test.</p>
<p>Assa was usually the main pilot (and the one making sure the autopilot was working well when it was on) with her brother in the co-pilot seat. Both of them were all too happy to have the opportunity, and the excuse to stare at the stars for hours on end.</p>
<p>They were not attached at the hip they had both done plenty apart. Assa was more sure of herself and had done a lot of solo travelling and internships with (what sounded like, from Lila’s unknowledgeable point of view) really cool and sustainable aerospace companies. She had discovered them during her engineering degree which she had ended up doing because she did not want to be “just” a pilot contrary to her brother.</p>
<p>Assa’s passion for sustainable aerospace is how they had all ended up getting recruited to help a station somewhere on an old mining planet. Its inhabitants had created a cooperative to transform the old mining equipment into an interactive amusement park. It aimed in making it fun for kids (and adults) to learn about a sustainable exploitation of resources to construct the transports they all needed to travel. (It was cooler, and way more well done than Lila could explain, but Lila was not an engineer way too excited about this project like Assa, nor one gifted with words to talk about things like Léandre.) Assa had begged them to stay and help the station. They had ended up as volunteers there for about a month during their seventh month away, each using their skills in the areas they could best help with. Lila had to recognise that it had been fun, if extremely tiring. The inhabitants of the station were all lovely and had a lot of stories to tell about different worlds they had been on or heard about from the visitors. When it was the time to go, they had all cried and said they would come back next time they passed nearby during a future adventure.</p>
<p>Hani was, despite being the co-pilot for their year in space, the one who had made a job out of piloting. He was the daredevil of the group and always had been, his sister channelling and enabling him since their birth. A couple of times they had ended up a little bit too close to asteroids and he had taken the helm, making them all sick in the process. When they had asked, he told them that he was happy to let his sister lead as she had less of an occasion to fly and it was nice to relax and sit back. Still, he was the more skilled out of the two and the one more likely to get them all out of tight corners in a way that might make them regret their full lunch, but more likely not to have to stop for three weeks and require Camille to make use of their skills. It was amazing to see Assa and Hani working together. They were both so in-synch with each other that they only needed a look to share their thoughts. It often made Lila wonder whether they could actually share their thoughts.</p>
<p>Then again, she could also share one look with her dear Léandre and instantly understand what she wanted. She had known Léandre since birth, they had photos of them side by side before they could even walk (the perks of having mums who were friends). They were each other’s best friends, always there for the other in good times and in bad ones. When Lila had broken up with her first boyfriend, when Léa had got broken up with as teens, the other had been there to pick up the pieces. It had taken them going to different schools in their late teens, Léa studying history and politics, Lila doing culinary school, for them to realise how much they missed the other and how much they wanted more than what they already had. They had started dating that first summer back home and had been together ever since. Their relationship had only deepened since and it made Lila very, very (very, very, very) happy. Léandre was the reason they had managed to get this year in space off the ground. She had coordinated it all beforehand, had planned everything that could be planned, read on all of the planets they wanted to visit, had learned the basics of several new languages, and had done all of this while studying her fourth year at university. Lila had been the one cooking for everyone and organising supplies, but Léa was the one overseeing everything. She was so great. She had been so excited when, during their eighth month travelling, they had stopped in a commune on an outskirt planet that she had studied for her thesis the year before. They had been pioneers in creating an utopia-like society decades before that had inspired the current system of government of the Earth. Even without the year of research and the deep knowledge that Léandre had, Lila had found the place really cool. Their food was a mix of all of the cultures of the people who were still living there or had lived there at some point in the past.</p>
<p>The way that Léa’s eyes had lit up when they had arrived and when she spoke to the people there, just the memory of it made Lila smile. She had taken so many notes and so many pictures. Well, she had been taking pictures everywhere, but especially there. They would continue speaking about it for years to come. Oh, Lila could not wait to have children and tell them how their mum had been so excited that she had accidentally dropped the ring and the speech she was going to use to propose to her right in front of her and not realised because she was searching for her notebook to ask questions to the elders.</p>
<p>And now, here they were. A few hours away from coming back home, from breaking their routine and creating new ones.  They would have to prepare their wedding, but that could wait for tomorrow. Currently, they were all relaxing in the living room: Lila, Léandre, Assa, and Hani in a big cuddle pile on the sofa watching a rerun of a silly tv series they have watched many times over the months, and Camille on their armchair casually sketching what looked to be a rendition of their current cuddle pile on their drawing pad.</p>
<p>It was a slow evening, everyone taking their time to be in the moment with the others. Hani kept trying to tickle his sister, who he knew was very ticklish, and she was trying to fight back pushing into Léandre next to her who fell even more on Lila. Léandre stood up to get out of the entanglement and because she was about to fall off the couch onto the floor and gave a look to Hani as if to say “Oh, you want to play? We’re going to play!”. She shared a look with Assa and as one, they plunged towards Hani, one from his side on the couch, the other from the top and they delivered a particularly effective tickle attack. Lila who was sat at the other end of the couch and had moved out of the way turned towards Camille and the both of them started laughing. They were soon joined by Hani falling deeper and deeper into the couch and laughing louder and louder. Assa and Léandre continued their tickle attack while smirking and laughing for a bit longer until all five of them were laughing so much that they had started to cry. They were tired, they were anxious about the return to their routine life on Earth, but they were all so happy. Once they managed to put their laughter under control, Léandre and Assa sitting on the floor, Hani and Lila on the couch, and Camille on the armchair, they all stayed breathing in companionable silence with only the sound of the tv in the background. Assa turned her head upside down to look at her brother and they smiled at each other with that smile that belonged only to the both of them. Lila patted the couch between her and Hani and Camille joined. They all held hands and put heads together in a circle.</p>
<p>Tomorrow, they would have many things to do, many stories to tell, but for now, they could enjoy each other’s company one last evening.</p>
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